IT TAKES A VILLAGE

This has been a big week for me at Bennett College.  I have been driving the 50 miles to Greensboro every day [I leave once again in an hour], visiting classes with my research expert, Ms. Dania Francis, who is being paid on the Spencer Foundation grant I was able to secure.  Dania is a brilliant young woman -- graduated from Smith College at nineteen, went to Harvard to do Economics and did not take to that rather odd environment, left Academia for a while, and is now about to get her doctorate in Public Policy at Duke University.  Dania lives in Boston with her husband and her tiny baby, Sloan.  Her dissertation director at Duke is William "Sandy" Garrity, Jr.

Sandy Garrity's father was William Garrity Sr, the founding Dean at UMass of the School of Health Sciences.  Bill Garrity was one of a small band of African-American scholars and administrators who for decades served as an informal network of support for the Black students who found their way to UMass.  When I joined the UMass Afro-American Studies Department, after twenty-one years on the campus in the Philosophy Department, I learned of this community within the commuinity for the first time.  It was one of the many things I learned about UMass by changing departments.

While Dania was on the Bennett Campus, I took her in to meet Esther Terry, my former Chair of Afro-American Studies at UMass and now the Interim President of Bennett.  Esther, of course, was an old and very good friend of the Garritys, and she greeted Dania warmly, in effect welcoming her into that circle.  The next day, Dania had a meeting wtih Sandy Garrity at Duke about her dissertation, and when we met later that day at Bennett, she said that she had told him about meeting Esther.

"I think she used to baby-sit me," this distinguished senior Duke professor said.

It takes a village.

A GEDANKENEXPERIMENT

All of you, I am sure, are aware of public opinion surveys showing that astonishing numbers of Americans believe mindlessly stupid things.  A recent Gallup Poll, for example, tells us that 46% of Americans believe that the earth was created ten thousand years ago.  These same people blithely answer "yes" when asked whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together.  What are we to make of information like this?

One natural response is to conclude that there are well over one hundred million ignorant, dead stupid Americans.  I am not aware of ever having had a conversation with one of these folks, but since, like all sensible people, I trust Gallup implicitly, I can only infer that I have thus far led a charmed life.  People who are this appallingly ignorant of the simplest facts of natural science, one would think, ought to be unable to function at even a minimally effective level in the modern world.  If they really believe the world was created ten thousand years ago, what sense can they make of the solar system, of computers, of the internal combustion engine, indeed of a vacuum cleaner?  Do they refuse to fly, fearing that the airplane will fall out of the sky?  Do they, on entering an elevator, look about anxiously to see whether the elevator slaves are ready to haul on the cables and raise the car?  Do they, each time they flip a light switch, step back to avoid the flare of the match as secret candles are lit?

I have been brooding on these and similar questions, and I have an alternative hypothesis.  Mind you, I have no direct confirmatory evidence for this hypothesis, so let us label it armchair speculation.  I offer it for your consideration, purely as what physicists call a gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment.

I have a suspicion that when a Gallup pollster asks these folks "Do you believe that the world was created in its present form ten thousand years ago?", what the respondents really hear is a lengthy and very complex question that goes something like this:

"In America today there is a sizeable minority of adults who have Bachelor's Degrees or more from good schools, who hold cushy jobs with nice salaries in comfortable offices, who live in upscale communities like Chapel Hill and Shaker Heights and Cambridge and Hyde Park, who expect to be, and are, accorded respect and deference in restaurants, doctor's offices, airline lounges, and bank lobbies, and whose cultural preferences are echoed on television and in magazines.  These people look down with a genial condescension on people like you.  They do not share your religious affiliations nor do they really respect them, though they may pay lip service to the notion that all religions are to be accorded superficial courtesy.  And they would not be caught dead in the neighborhood in which you live or at the events where you amuse yourself.  Now, do you accept the fact that you are among the disrespected, the condescended to, the left out, the social, intellectual, and cultural underclass of America?  Are you prepared to tug your forelock or touch your cap in acknowledgement of your inferior status?  Of course, I am not going to ask you this question directly.  Instead, I am going to ask you whether you think God created the world in its present form ten thousand years ago.  But you and I understand that this is really a shorthand code version of the longer question, and I quite well realize that if you answer my little question 'yes' you are really answering my longer question 'no!' "

That is what I think is going on when we get these bizarre poll results.  Looked at this way, the responses make sense, and are, I might even suggest, honorable.  If we want to reduce the number of people who say the world was created ten thousand years ago, we will be wasting our time pushing for better science courses in high school.  What we really need to do is to break down the class barriers and wealth and income inequality in American society.  But that, I am afraid, is a very much larger project.

A SHORT ANSWER TO A SERIOUS COMMENT FROM CHRIS

On September 6th, after I bemoaned the lack of things to blog about, Chris asked me whether I might do a tutorial on Volume III of CAPITAL.  I responded with a post on the 10th briefly explaining why I did not think it would be much fun, and Chris immediately took exception to my explanation, citing and giving links to videos of lectures by Andrew Kliman, as well as to some publications.  I am currently very busy with my Bennett project, and I simply do not have the time to watch the videos from start to finish and read the works referenced, so that I can give a serious reply.  But it seems to me I owe Chris some answer, however fragmentary, so here goes.

As I suspected, Kliman is a student or follower of Richard Wolff and Steven Resnick, both of them old friends of mine from the UMass Economics Department.  Rick and Steve have for more than thirty years been developing and teaching a systematic interpretation of Marx's economic theories.  In true academic fashion, they have published books and articles, trained students, organized annual conferences, started a journal, and done all the other things that we do in the Academy to advance our views.  I have enormous respect both for their work and for their dedication and energy, even though I do not agree with them about a number of things.  Our specific disagreement over the so-called Transformation Problem is rather technical, but at the risk of losing everyone but Chris, I will spend a few paragraphs explaining what is at stake.

I have argued in my published writings on Marx and also on this blog that in CAPITAL, Volume I, Marx assumes equal organic composition of capital, only relaxing this assumption in Volumes II and III.  Since Ricardo's version of the Labor Theory of Value is correct only under this severe constraint [as Ricardo himself was aware], this assumption allows Marx to focus on what he considers the more fundamental question that Ricardo cannot answer even in the special case in which his theory is true, namely why there is a positive rate of profit in a capitalist economy.  Marx then introduces his distinction between labor and labor power to solve the problem, demonstrating thereby that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Mathematically speaking, the arguments by which the various propositions of Volume I are demonstrated -- at least on my interpretation of the book -- presuppose that competition establishes a uniform rate of profit throughout the economy.  It is this assumption that yields the conclusion that input and output prices are identical for a given commodity.  This way of analyzing things, which Kliman correctly labels a "simultaneous" approach, is widely adopted in the large international literature written by contemporary mathematical economists interested in casting Marx's arguments in modern dress.  I am a big fan of this approach.

However, there is an alternative way of reading Volume I.  If you give up the assumption that competition equilibrates the system by establishing a single economy-wide profit rate, then you can represent Marx's analysis as approaching such a uniform profit rate over time by way of a series of adjustments on the part of capitalists to the information presented by the market.  In that analysis, input and output prices are not identical.  This is not a simultaneous analysis, but a temporal analysis. 

But I believe that the end result of these two modes of analysis is the same.  The same relationships emerge between labor values and prices, and the same divergences of prices from labor values appear, which must be explained and analyzed by the same arguments that Marx invokes in Volume III.  So I do not see how adopting Kliman's approach alters, in the end, our understanding either of capitalist economies or of Marx's text.

The second question, on which I am afraid I have nothing at all to say, is the dispute over Marx's claim that there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as more capital intensive techniques are introduced.  I would have to read, or else watch on video, Kliman's analysis of that dispute, and I just have not done so yet.

Chris, I hope this at least demonstrates that I take your comments seriously, even if I am not now in a position to respond to them fully.

[BAD] MUSIC TO MY EARS

When I was a boy, the gold standard in choruses was the 360 member Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  This was, as the name suggests, the choir of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it seemed to consist of every able-bodied non-tone-deaf Mormon within a one hundred mile radius of the Tabernacle.  Pictures of the choir [no television in those days] showed banks upon banks of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, standing on risers that seemed, like Jacob's Ladder, to ascend to the heavens.  Although the choir clearly equated numbers with musical power, it was a rather odd fact that as a musical group, they did not make that joyous a noise.  Rather, they produced a muddy, indistinct sound that seemed to be coming from a cathedral bedeviled by inconvenient echoes.

This odd contradiction between the sheer size of the choir and its rather mediocre musical power was a consequence of a simple fact about the generation of sound waves familiar to anyone who has ever sat in front of an old monitor watching a sine wave rise and fall across the screen.  Sound, of course, is generated by the agitation of the gas particles in the air.  It travels in a series of expansions and contractions that are nicely visualized by those old sine waves.  When you add a second sine wave to the first, it can either match the first perfectly, in which case the combination is augmented by the addition of the two magnitudes, or it can conflict with the first, in which case the interference of the two waves diminishes the combined sound.  The Mormon Tabernacle singers, numbered though they were in the hundreds, were not, if the truth be told, very good singers.  They did not all sing on key [or even, or so it seemed to me, in the same key], and their entrances and exits were ragged.  As a result, the sound waves generated by their vibrating uvulae interfered with one another, producing what I can only describe as a brown sound.

The truth of this observation was brought home to me powerfully one evening in the late 40's [I was still in high school] when I attended a concert at Town Hall in Manhattan by the newly formed Robert Shaw Chorale.  Shaw was a dynamic young conductor with radically new ideas about what a professional chorus ought to be.  When the Chorale came out on stage, I was astonished to see that there were no more than twenty or so of them.  I was sitting in the peanut gallery, of course, and I began to worry about whether I would be able to hear them.  The singers, all hand-picked professionals, did not group themselves into sections -- sopranos, altos, tenors, basses -- as was the universal practice at that time.  Instead, they lined up in several ranks man-woman-man-woman-man-woman.  What is more, instead of being bunched tightly together so that each one's left shoulder seemed welded to the next right shoulder,  they spaced themselves perhaps two or three feet from one another.  It was clear that Shaw had some very unorthodox ideas about choral singing.

When they opened their mouths to sing the first notes of the first composition, a blast of sound filled Town Hall, as audible to me near the back of the second balcony as it must have been to the toffs in the expensive seats in the orchestra section.  The reason for this astonishing power, of course, was that the singers were all perfectly in tune and perfectly synchronized with one another.  Their spacing, which succeeded brilliantly in blending the different voices, was made possible by the fact that it was not necessary to group all the sopranos near the one or two of their section who could be counted on to find the pitch at an entrance or pick up a conductor's cue.  Compare, if you will, the playing of  a fine string quartet with that of a mediocre orchestra.

These thoughts crossed my mind this morning as I reflected on the odd failure of Romney's super-pac multi-millions to achieve any measurable success in the campaign against president Obama.  Why, I wondered, were the vast sums of which Democrats were so fearful having so little impact on the race?  Then I thought about Shaw and the Tabernacle Choir, and I saw what might be an answer.

The Romney campaign, it occurred to me, is suffering from the advertising equivalent of the self-defeating interference of the sound waves issuing from choruses like the Tabernacle Choir.  The Romney campaign is producing what psychologists, reaching for the same analogy, call cognitive dissonance.  Since North Carolina is considered a "battleground state," our television viewing is repeatedly interrupted by political thirty second spot ads.  The Romney campaign started out pillorying Obama as Other, un-American, out of touch with American values, a Socialist [I wish!].  But that did not seem to have any negative impact on his poll numbers, which most strikingly revealed that Americans like the President, even when they disagree with him.  Apparently cautioned by this evidence that their efforts to make Americans fear and hate Obama were not working, the campaign did an almost complete about face.  Now, the ads feature a syrupy voice saying that although Obama is a nice guy, he is in over his head, and unable to deal with America's problems.  The effect of these two series of ads, I thought, is rather like the effect of having the altos in a chorus singing slightly off key or out of synch with one another.  The sound waves interfere with each other, producing a muddy sound of no great power.

The same result is produced by the campaign's constant shifts in its positions on such issues as "pre-existing conditions" in health care reform or a voucher system to replace Medicare.  Political junkies, like music mavens, might be able to disambiguate the conflicting messages conveyed by the Romney campaign's ads, but the general public, like the audience at a concert of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, just hears a blurred sound of no particular direction or distinction.

I think they would have had more success with a sharp, precise, clean message, however unfamiliar to the ear.  Better a good performance of Pierrot Lunaire than a blurred rendering of the Messiah. 

 

MARX SHTICK

When I was flailing about, looking for something on which to blog, someone suggested a commentary on Volume Three of CAPITAL.  I went back and took another look at Volume Three, and although there are, as one might expect, a number of interesting passages [to which I had appended lengthy marginal notes in my copy], it does not call to me as a project.  There are two things in Volume Three worthy of extended commentary.  The first, on which I have written at some length in UNDERSTANDING MARX, is Marx's attempt to resolve once and for all the problems with the Labor Theory of Value that are not handled in Volume One.  Marx has a brilliant idea, which however does not quite work.  To summarize the matter succinctly and, I fear, somewhat mysteriously for those of you who are not true devotees of Marx's economic theory, his solution works in the special and important case in which the economy is embarked on a balanced growth path of the sort analysed by John von Neumann in a famous theorem, but it does not work in the more general case in which here is luxury production and consumption.

The other topic is the famous claim that as a capitalist economy develops and substitutes capital for labor, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.  The point of the claim is that there is, built into capitalism, a self-defeating thrust toward crisis.  Alas, on this one, Marx was just plain wrong.  The Japanese economist, Okishio, proved in a 1960 theorem [I think that is the correct date] that in a capitalist economy equilibrated by a single economy wide profit rate, an capital-intensive innovation in production that temporarily yields a super-profit for the entrepreneur who has introduced it will, when it has been adopted throughout the economy by all other producers in the same sector, result in an unambiguous rise in the rate of profit.

Why is Volume One such a coruscatingly brilliant work, quite unlike anything ever seen before or since, whereas Volumes Two and Three are somewhat pedestrian and tedious, illuminated to be sure by flashes of genuine insight but hardly worthy of the intense study that is so rewarding to readers of Volume One?  There are several reasons, I think.  First of all, it is in Volume One that Marx gives full voice to his penetrating insight into the mystifications and false consciousness of capitalist economy and society.  This material, found essentially in the first ten chapters of the book, is, I say with absolute confidence, far and away the most brilliant philosophical, sociological, psychological, and economic analysis ever attempted.  There is simply nothing else in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries to compare with it.  The second reason is that for a variety of expository and analytical reasons, Marx chooses to restrict himself in Volume One to the special case of Equal Organic Composition of Capital in which Ricardo's Labor Theory of Value actually holds true.  This enables Marx at one and the same time to acknowledge what is of enduring value in Ricardo's theory and also to focus on the deep, underlying problem of which Ricardo was not even aware, namely, Why is there profit at all in a capitalist economy?  To this day, sophisticated mathematical economists are incapable of recognizing, let alone dealing with, this fundamental question.  The third reason is that although Marx was a brilliant intuitive economic theorist -- one of the two or three greatest economic theorists of all time, according to Michio Morishima -- he did not have the technical tools to carry his analysis forward in a successful fashion beyond the point that he was able to reach by intuition alone.  It is this failing on his part that led Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, in an infamous and disgracefully snide crack, to refer to Marx as a "minor post-Ricardian autodidact."  [As I have remarked elsewhere, I have always thought that Samuelson, the author of the most successful elementary Economics text ever written, was offended at the thought that Marx might arrive at important truths without having taken Introductory Micro.]

My two books on Marx say at length what I think of his theories, and it would be otiose to repeat here what I put on paper there.  So I am afraid that I as still left casting about for something to blog about.

TICK TOCK

Patience is one of the many virtues that I have never managed to cultivate.  If I were a farmer, I would be forever pulling up sprouts to see whether they were rooting.  But time does pass, and with the passage of time, Nate Silver's "Monte Carlo simulations" [as one commentator has taught me to call them] inexorably push Obama's election chances up.  At the moment, they stand at 80.7%, a gain of 6.2% in the past eight days.  News reports indicate that Romney campaign operatives are beginning to recognize that they are on a glide path to defeat.  I would imagine they are pinning their hopes on a combination of the vast sums their super-pacs will throw into negative ads and some sort of stunning upset victory in the presidential debates.  But the scores, if not, hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent on ads thus far have had little or no effect, and the debates are absolutely certtain to be a draw at best for Romney.

Barring a catastrophic international upheaval [the collapse of the Euro Zone, an Israeli attack on Iran] or a domestic terrorist attack, the only hope of the Romney camp is to take some big chance in a desperate effort to change the contours of the race.  But they have had their VP moment, to no noticeable positive effect, and if they send Romney out to make a violent frontal attack on Obama in the first debate, his legendary unflappability will make Romney look as cranky and strange as Clint Eastwood and the chair.

So, I repeat what I said some while ago on this blog.  Romney will not win, and Obama will be re-elected.

EXPLICATION DE TEXTE

I had an email asking me what the pun is in the title of Philip Roth's novel, Portnoy's Complaint.  Okay, so that is a bald-faced lie.  Nobody asked.  I just wanted to explain [this might be taken as an instance of "The Teacher's Complaint."]  The title is a double pun:  First of all, there is the medical sense of complaint, as represented by Roth's faux medical definition at the beginning of the novel of what is bothering Portnoy.  Second, there is the fact that Portnoy's is perpetually complaining about his mother, who seems to be the real, albeit hidden, focus of his obsessive sexual fantasies.  Finally, in 16th century English poetry, a "lover's complaint" is a poem in which the poet, addressing his beloved, bemoans the fact that she does not requite his passion.  All in all, a rather witty title.